Xi Chen acknowledges generous Doctoral Research Grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University and precious data set provided by the Development Strategy and Governance Division at IFPRI. Conference Travel Grant provided by the Department of Applied Economics and...

This paper is based on our ongoing joint work with Ravi Kanbur. Xi Chen is grateful to Ravi Kanbur for invaluable comments, guidance and encouragement. For comments and suggestions, please direct correspondence to Xi Chen at xc49@cornell.edu.

Numerous national transfer programs around the world are designed with uniform benefit schedules imposed by central governments, but implemented by local governments. The Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in Ethiopia, the second largest safety net in Sub Saharan Africa, is one such program....

The objective of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between changes in per capita manufacturing employment, manufacturing earnings per worker and human capital investment in nearly 3,000 U.S. counties over the period 1980-90. Two key hypotheses are tested: 1. Communities in...

In this paper we attempt to identify and model factors associated with medical doctors' county-level location decisions. Our goal is to determine whether public policy levers and private incentives exist which can be manipulated to increase the availability of doctors in rural areas. After...

We examine how the system of “federalism, Chinese style” functions in the context of land allocation. China’s land laws give provision of land a central role in local officials’ growth promotion strategies. Requisitions of farmland by local authorities have engendered significant rural...

This paper analyzes the impact of Public Works (PW) from the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in the agricultural regions of Ethiopia. In particular, based on a household model with two inputs, I explore the eects of the program on capital and labor decisions using the Ethiopian Rural...

This paper builds a model determining optimal capacities of diversion dams or water transfer projects. The model incorporates stochastic inflows to the dams and the role of the dam capacity in reducing overflows, and gives a closed-form expression of the marginal benefit of capacities....